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Disco Demolition Night: When sports promotions go wrong
Joe Lapointe
Chicago - The New York Times News Service
Last updated on Saturday, Jul. 04, 2009 09:22PM EDT
In the warm air that night, baseball's routine and soothing sounds mixed with the tribal cadence of off-color chanting, the drifting scent of marijuana and the sight of vinyl records descending through the summer dusk like Frisbees.
"They would slice around you and stick in the ground," Rusty Staub said. "It wasn't just one, it was many. Oh, God almighty, I've never seen anything so dangerous in my life. I begged the guys to put on their batting helmets."
Staub was the player representative for the Detroit Tigers when they visited the Chicago White Sox on Disco Demolition Night, July 12, 1979, at Comiskey Park. Few sports promotions ever went so awry; few are remembered as well. Some in charge that night still defend it.
One is Roland Hemond, then the general manager of the White Sox. "It was a great promotion," he said, chuckling over the telephone from Arizona, where he works for the Diamondbacks. "We're still talking about it today."
The event was conceived by a Chicago disc jockey, Steve Dahl. He and his followers resented how disco threatened rock 'n' roll.
So Mike Veeck, the son of the team's owner, Bill Veeck, invited Dahl to blow up a bin full of disco records in center field between games of a twinight doubleheader.
During the first game, the stands filled with Dahl's listeners, who got in for 98 cents if they brought a record to be destroyed.
Alan Trammell, then the Tigers' shortstop, said, "I remember from the get-go, it wasn't a normal crowd." Trammell, now a Cubs coach, said umpires ordered the grounds crew to clear debris from the warning track between innings of the first game.
"The outfielders were definitely a little scared," Trammell said. Ron LeFlore, a former convict, played center field for Detroit, "and Ronnie wasn't usually afraid of anything."
The Sox did not expect such a large crowd, which was officially announced as 47,795. Mike Veeck said that it was really closer to 60,000 and that he had hired security for 35,000. "That's what we thought attendance would be," Veeck said.
Staub said: "People brought ladders. They were climbing in from the outside. It was like a riot."
Veeck ordered yellow-jacketed guards to go outside to stop fans from crashing the gates.
That allowed the spectators inside the ballpark to storm the field without much resistance. Jack Morris, a Tigers pitcher, recalled "whiskey bottles were flying over our dugout" after Detroit won the first game, 4-1.
Then Dahl blew up the records.
"And then all hell broke loose," Morris said. "They charged the field and started tearing up the pitching rubber and the dirt. They took the bases. They started digging out home plate."
The batting cage was dragged out and trashed; fans burned banners and climbed foul poles. Above the field, Hemond's private box sheltered the wife and children of Don Kessinger, the White Sox' manager, but fans tried to climb inside.
Dave Dombrowski, now the president of the Tigers, was a 22-year-old assistant to Hemond. "My duty was to keep people from crawling in there," Dombrowski said. Harry Caray, then a raucous White Sox announcer, urged calm over the public-address system.
Videotape of that night shows the Sox wearing strange black-and-white uniforms with collars. It was a different era for baseball and its fan support. Four major league teams in 1979 sold fewer than a million tickets.
One such team was the Mets, who drew 788,905 fans. The Dodgers led the majors with 2.8 million. The White Sox drew 1.28 million. The Oakland Athletics drew only 306,763.
So teams dreamed up novelties to attract crowds.
In 1974, Cleveland had 10-cent beer night, a chaotic event that ended after drunken fans threw debris at bat-wielding players and the Indians forfeited the game to the Texas Rangers.
The chief umpire in Cleveland that night was Nestor Chylak. He happened to be the supervisor of umpires at Disco Demolition Night. After Chylak met with his umpires, Bill Veeck and Tigers Manager Sparky Anderson, the White Sox forfeited the second game.
On the Detroit television station WDIV, the announcer George Kell seemed surprised. He said order had been restored, fans were calm and the field was in good shape.
But Kell's partner, Al Kaline, attended Chylak's meeting and reported, "They're afraid of somebody getting hurt, and also, the fact that home plate was uprooted from the ground and it has not been measured, it has not been properly put back in."
Kaline reported that Bill Veeck "was really complaining" and had asked the umpires, "What am I going to do with the tickets?" In the background of the television tape, Veeck can be heard telling the fans: "Please keep your rain checks. We apologize."
Mike Veeck, who promotes minor league baseball, said that one vendor broke a hip but that no one else was seriously injured; the crowd was relatively nonviolent, although unruly.
"The great thing was all the kids were stoned," he said. When asked to explain, Veeck said marijuana's effects were milder than those of beer. "Had we had drunks to deal with, then we would have had some trouble," he said. "The kids were really docile."
By docile, Veeck said he meant that the fans ran off the field as soon as a police squad arrived, some in helmets.
"It was a strange night," Trammell said. "It was crazy. What a night. Thirty years later, and we're still laughing."